Senior business consultants are successful.  Their careers show that.  Their success cuts across a broad spectrum of industries and occupations.  Sometimes it’s best to let an experience illustrate their success.  Here’s one about sales coaching.  We hope you will enjoy it.

Salespeople Motivations Uncovered

This time of year, most business owners are wondering if their salespeople will deliver required annual sales results. They also assume their salespeople are totally motivated by sales compensation. Recent Employee Engagement surveys have revealed that salespeople are motivated by something completely different. Salespeople value coaching and support from their manager’s as the biggest reason they perform well and stay with a company. What business owners don’t realize is that the lack of coaching and development of their salespeople might be the biggest risk to achieving results and retention of even their best salespeople.

Isn’t The Sales Coaching Need Obvious?

Most managers don’t coach because they don’t have the skills, or they don’t think they have the time, but it is a critical part of success in their role as leader. At a recent mid-size regional healthcare services company, sales were lagging and most of the salespeople were underperforming. There was no sales coaching culture or expectation in place for regional managers. Turnover in the sales force was becoming an expensive problem.

The Sales Coaching Process

Rather than waiting and wondering if the sales would come in each month, management decided to invest in their sales managers to improve performance and reduce turnovers. Our senior business consultant implemented a sales coaching skills workshop for sales managers to develop their coaching skill set. He helped the managers develop agreement on expectations of what sales performance issues were the most important to coach and helped them to develop an accountability process for coaching sessions and follow-up with their salespeople.  Our consultant established weekly follow up conference calls for sales managers to allow managers to share their successes and challenges, to keep the process alive, and to maintain accountability of the management team.   

A Company Sales Coaching Culture Is Born

After 3 months of consistent, effective sales coaching calls and on-going reinforcement calls with managers, the company began to see monthly sales quota’s being met, increased motivation and enthusiasm in the sales force, and fewer turnovers of salespeople.  Salespeople are now looking forward to schedule coaching sessions with their managers as they are experiencing increased sales and productivity.  Business owners are more confident the annual sales goals will be met, if not exceeded!  All in a short time.

Developing a sales coaching culture is not difficult, but it does take focused attention and effort.  Understanding how to develop that culture and train managers to be sales coaches are what one of our senior business consultants is expert at.  If your business needs to grow through increased sales do you think you could benefit from using the services of a sales coaching expert?  Just a thought as you seek a better way to achieve your annual sales goals.